A few weeks ago, in our weekly planning we were asking ourselves how can we increase our lead generation. As the discussions evolved we decided to take a look at our tool box and I said “let’s run an experiment” as I picked the lean experiment template. For more information on this template there here’s a reference that I like. lean experiment exercise by Jurgen Appelo. Now we had a tool, we just needed to write down the hypothesis we wanted to bring forward.
How can we run an experiment that will help us generating leads with minimal investment?
After bouncing a few ideas we came up with our first iaiao.dev experiment. To put it short, the discussions were around how can we show one of our value: transparency and our skillset: application development . So we came up with the following hypothesis:
We believe that sharing publicly an experiment on how to digitalize an idea will generate leads. We will know that we were wrong if we generate less than one reference per week over a period of 8 weeks
With this hypothesis in hands we were ready to start working on a new idea that can be digitalized and shared it publicly with our network. The idea we came up with was a platform that can introduce two entity to do business together through a third party that would receive a reward. In order to see if this idea had some potential we’ve build a survey and start sending it to many people in our network. Here are some of the results that came out of this survey.
It’s now time to validate our hypothesis
We believe that sharing publicly an experiment on how to digitalize an idea will generate leads. We will know that we were wrong if we generate less than one reference per week over a period of 8 weeks…..
(drum roll) …….
it’s a fail but on the brighter side we did generate some reference, just not enough to pass the experiment. In retrospective, we can ask ourselves, if we used the right measure, or if expected results was the right one according to our reach on LinkedIn. Or should we have used a real product idea (one we are actively working on) instead of creating one for the experiment? We did learn that people we interested in the way we are working. That people like the approach we were using to connect with them, it was refreshing and different. This encourage us to continue being transparent and share our experiment with the world.
We are currently working on our next experiment and we will share is with you soon.
For those interested in the idea of a referral platform, we discovered that Bravado.co released a similar product call Warm intros 2 weeks in our experiment.